The Intersection of Creativity and Balancing Your Bottom Line

Over the last few weeks, we've been tweaking our family household budget.  In order to get a better handle on where our money is flowing, I've been trying to keep track of what I'm spending -- where, on what and why.


It has been an eye opener, to say the least.  We spend a lot of money on crap we don't really need.

This is not exactly the thing you want to find out about yourself -- that you have an impulse purchase issue when it comes to items that your child or your husband might want and you are all about making them happy and so you buy before you really even think about it -- but there it is in black and white on receipts, week in and week out. 

And so?  I'm trying to spend my money more wisely and consciously.

Making Our Home Our Castle

One of our goals this year is to get a better handle on our family budget.  As we hurtle toward retirement, being able to live comfortably when we are spending well below our income is a big goal.

Both of us have seen far too many people need to keep working well past when they would rather have retired because their expenses were too great to be able to stop and enjoy their lives.  We've also seen far too many people retire, and then have to find some other part-time employment or something else to cover rising medical or other expenses that weren't planned for earlier.

We're very blessed in that we have the means to live well, because we have both worked very hard to get us to this point and continue to do so.

But that doesn't mean we ought to just take it for granted that will always be the case, or that we shouldn't be more thoughtful about how we use our resources.  Using them more wisely is always a good goal. 

One way to enjoy what we already have more while spending less is to get our home where we want it to be -- comfortable, cozy, inviting, less cluttered -- so that spending time at home is preferable to going out, spending more money and buying crap you don't need.

I've been looking around our house lately with that sort of eye toward what is working for us and what is not.

On The Importance Of Spending Earnestly

I found this quote from Joe Dominguez particularly compelling, and wanted to share it with all of you, discussing saving versus spending at random:

It's investing in the future, your kids' future, your own future, your nation's future rather than glomming on to it all for yourself, right now, and maxing out the credit cards, which is putting a lien on your future, on your kids and the whole system. That's the craziness of today.

I say this knowing that I spent at random this past weekend, and that I've been trying to be more conscious about it. But sometimes? You just slip into the spending mode and you don't even realize it.

At least I do.

And then I have buyer's remorse on the other end of the transaction.  Not because I don't have the money to spend, necessarily, but more because I could have spent that money more wisely elsewhere.

If you want to make a difference, and I do -- I so want to make a difference for someone who needs it -- then oughtn't I be more careful with my pennies so that I can have more to give to folks who need it rather than wasting my pennies on things neither I nor my family really need, and on products that only enrich the people selling them to me and not much else?

Pinching Garden Pennies: Plants On A Budget

Tis the season:  I've been bitten by the spring gardening bug, and I'm jonesing to get my hands in the soil and start working on my little Square Foot Garden.

Alas, the weather is freezing cold and planting is still a ways off here because of frost through most of April.  Our little microclimate area is a wee bit unpredictable, and I'd rather not plant early only to lose everything with a hard freeze.

So, what's a girl to do?  Lots of planning and looking at garden articles and magazines and books. 

One thing I've been especially interested in this year is stretching my garden dollars -- in a still tight economy this is really important for most folks.  That's especially true with our family as we are also currently thinking about ways to be more careful with our money so that we can teach our daughter the value of thrift as a means to help others by using the money more wisely and for better purposes.

We want to give more of our disposable income to charity, and in order to do that, we need to save more of our disposable income.  We talked a lot about ways to do that over the weekend and we are nibbling around the edges on a project that I'll share much more about in the days ahead.

Let's just say that thinking about spending more wisely for the greater good is something we've been talking about a lot the last few days.

In any event, I've been re-reading some of my gardening books to pull ideas from them on wiser use of my gardening resources.  I've also been doing a bit of research and reading online.  And I want to share some of that with all of you.

A Word About American Girl Knock-Off Dolls

I've had a couple of questions about 18-inch dolls that are knock-off versions of American Girl dolls (since my last post about them), and I wanted to address them for folks:

The Peanut owns an American Girl "Just Like Me" doll.  "Natalie" is pictured here at our recent tea party and, as you can see, she gets a lot of outfit changes (as well as tiara time) at this house.

That said, other friends have dolls from other lines that are lovely and also well-loved by the girls who own them.  If your child is not big on labels, there are dolls in just about every price range that might fit what you want:  Our Generation dolls at Target (I've actually been thinking about getting The Peanut an Our Generation Sydney doll as a "friend" for Natalie, but not for Christmas this year -- for her birthday, if she expresses interest still in another doll); Friends Boutique dolls at WalMart that are made by Lillian Vernon (who has a similar line that is made for Toys-R-Us as well); or Springfield Collection dolls at craft stores like A.C. Moore or Michaels.

While the knock-off dolls can be nice for a while, I've noticed a couple of issues with them that have not been issues for us with the American Girl doll.

1)  The hair on the knock-off lines just does not stay as nice.  With repeated combing or play, and especially if your child is going to sleep with the doll and muss it around a lot, the hair on the knock-off dolls gets really snarly and tough to comb back out.  If you braid it back out of the way, you can stave off the snarling a bit longer, according to a mom whose daughter has had a knock-off for a while.  I asked because I'm thinking about a knock-off as a second doll for The Peanut -- one expensive American Girl doll is enough for us, I think.

But the significant hair issues with the knock-off lines that I've seen have given me pause because The Peanut is a bit of a hair stylist wanna be, and her doll gets lots of hair clip love.  A half-balding doll is not a pretty sight, so I haven't decided if this is the route we will go -- or if Natalie will just have to be content with Barbie coming for a sleepover instead.  (The things you think of for your kids, eh?)

Quick Southwestern Rice Side Dish

I finally bought a new desk chair today, after giving away the older La-Z-Boy recliner that I'd been using as a temporary seat.  It was way too low and it made writing for any length of time uncomfortable, even though it was really comfy as a plain old chair.

We just couldn't fit it well into the living room any longer without overcrowding everything.  So I found it a new home with someone who could really use it.

And managed to find myself a new desk chair that has memory foam in it, so my achy joints are much happier at a much better height for typing.

I found it, of all places, at Sam's Club several weeks ago, but waited to buy it until we had gotten the recliner out of the way, which happened this morning.  Finally.  When we went over to get my desk chair, we found that the one we purchased was the last one they had.

Clearly it is a popular chair, and I'm thrilled I managed to get one.  So is my back, because it has an awesome back support feature, too.

While we were there, we picked up a rotisserie chicken for dinner this evening.

I love the rotisserie chickens from Sam's Club; they are tender, moist and nicely flavored, and the skin comes off easily for a less fatty meal.  Plus, they make for a light cooking day for me.

But, when we got home, I couldn't figure out what to serve with it.  Sure, we can have a salad -- but what else?

Delish Dinner

Found some bone-in chicken breasts on sale in a large family-sized pack today while The Peanut and I were at the store. 

Thought I could pop them in the slow cooker and get a two-fer:  chicken and homemade stock at the same time.  Plus, since it is a family pack, I'll have enough chicken for dinner tonight and leftovers to covert to more meals for a couple more days.

And so? 

They are cooking away at the moment and smelling fantastic.

Lately, I've been trying to cook by pulling things I already have out of the cabinet, the garden and/or the freezer.   With the exception of the chicken breasts that we got on markdown today, that's exactly what the rest of dinner will be:  stuff we already had.

Trying to be less wasteful and more mindful of using what we have wherever possible.  Which is not always easy, is it?

So, what am I cooking at the moment?

Tapping Into My Inner Frugalista

When I wrote the other day about financial independence and our retirement planning, I mentioned our plan to become more conscious of our spending and, thus, to hopefully make a transition to spending less and being happier with what we have.

To that end, we've been writing down what we've spent money on this week and...whew!...what an eye opener.

Financial books often tout this as a first step toward fiscal understanding.  Boy, can I see why now.

I'm currently reading a recently purchased book which has turned out to be something of a catalyst for me: Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less. We could not have picked this book up at a better time, honestly, and I'm enjoying the read if not deciding that some of the tips in it will work well for us and some will never, ever fly.

But that's all part of the learning curve, isn't it?  As is this spending log.

Just like with dieting and keeping a "food log" so that you can calculate calories, keeping a spending log works on the same principle and makes you infinitely more conscious of how you spend your dollars.  Or how you don't spend them.

For my spending log, I'm using an old mini-notebook that got bought years ago and never used, that I found in one of my desk drawers.

Lesson one?  I buy a lot of crap that I don't immediately need -- especially something that I find on sale and because it's a good price, I think of it as spending money to save money and then never find a use for whatever it is I've bought -- and I need to stop it.

The Quest For Financial Independence

Mr. ReddHedd and I have been talking a lot about financial independence lately.

As we age, contemplating what is needed for retirement comfort is a more and more prevalent topic of conversation at our house.  Which is probably a normal, albeit slightly morbid, consequence of getting a few more gray hairs.

There is a quote from Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield that sums things up nicely:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Part of our strategy is to sock away as much as we can afford in our 401(k), Roth IRAs and the like as well as paying down every bit of debt we can possibly pay down as quickly as we possibly can. (Those student loans take a while, don't they?)

But haven't we all learned the lesson that no matter how much you plan in terms of investment, the stock market doesn't always play along with what you want from it?